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HO PARTY HOW, 



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ALL FOR OUR COUNTRY. 



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PHILADELPHIA: 

CRISSY & MARKLEY, PRINTERS, GOLDSMITHS HALL, LIBRARY STREET. 
1863. 



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ADDEESS 

ANCIS LIE 

CHAIRMAN OF THE COUNCIL'S COMMITTEE ON ADDRESSES 



Read at the Meeting of the Loyal National League, l>y their request, in 
Union Square, New York, on the Wih of April, 1SG3. 



It is just and wise that men engaged in a great and arduous cause 
should profess anew, from time to time, their faith, and pledge them- 
selves to one another, to stand by their cause to the last extremity, 
even at the sacrifice of all they have and all that God has given 
them — their wealth, their blood, and their children's blood. We 
solemnly pledge all this to our cause, for it is the cause of our Coun- 
try and her noble history, of freedom, and justice, and truth — it is 
the cause of all we hold dearest on this earth: we profess and pledge 
this — plainly, broadly, openly in the cheering time of success, and 
most fervently in the day of trial and reverses. 

We recollect how, two years ago, when reckless arrogance attacked 
Fort Sumter, the response to that boom of treasonable cannon 
was read, in our city, in the flag of our country — waving from every 
steeple and School-house, from City Hall and Court House, from 
every shop window and market-stall, and fluttering in the hand of 
every child, and on the head-gear of every horse in the busy street. 



a NO PARTY NOW, 

Two years have passed; uncounted sacrifices have been made— sacri- 
fices of wealth, of blood, and limb, and life — of friendship and 
brotherhood, of endeared and hallowed pursuits and sacred ties — 
and still the civil war is raging in bitterness and heart-burning — 
still we make the sarafi profession, and still we pledge ourselves 
firmly to hold on to our cause, and persevere in the struggle into 
which unrighteous men, bewildered by pride, and stimulated by bit- 
ter hatred, have plunged us. 

We profess ourselves to be lo^al citjzens of these United States ; 
and by loyalty weTW'a^ft^f^oti'dvanj:! l<^ng^evotk)^o thVobject 
to which a loyal man — a loyal husband, a loyal friend, a loyal citi- 
zen — devotes himself. We eschew the attenuated argument derived 
by trifling schomr? m>m rffe£gre%tyniology. We take the core and 
substance of this weighty word, and pledge ourselves that we will 
loyally — not merely outwardly and formally, according to the let- 
ter, but fervently and according to the spirit — adhere to our coun- 
try, to her institutions, to freedom and her power, and to that great 
institution called the government of our country, founded by our 
fathers, and loved by their sons, and by all right-minded men who 
have become citizens of this land by choice and not by birth — who 
have wedded this country in the maturity of their age as verily their 
own. We pledge ourselves as National men, devoted to the Nation- 
ality of this great people. No government can wholly dispense 
with loyalty, except the fiercest despotism ruling by naked intimi- 
dation ; but a republic stands in greater need of it than any other 
government, and most of all a republic beset by open rebellion and insi- 
dious treason. Loyalty is pre-eminently a civic virtue in a free coun- 
try. It is patriotism cast in the graceful mould of candid devotion 
to the harmless government of an unshackled nation. 

In pledging ourselves thus, we know of no party. Parties are 
unavoidable in free countries, and may be useful if they acknow- 
ledge the country far above themselves, and remain within the sanc- 
tity of the fundamental law which protects the enjoyment of liberty 
prepared for all within its sacred domain. But Party has no mean- 
ing in far the greater number of the highest and the common rela- 
tions of human life. When we are ailing, we do not take medicine 



ALL FOR OUR COUNTRY. o 

by party prescription. We do not build ships by party measure- 
ment ; we do not pray for our daily bread by party distinctions ; 
we do not take our chosen ones to our bosoms by party demarca- 
tions, nor do we eat or drink, sleep or wake, as partisans. We do 
not enjoy the flowers of spring, nor do we harvest the grain, by 
party lines. We do not incur punishments for infractions of the 
commandments according to party creeds ; and we do not, we must 
hot, love and defend our country and our liberty, dear to us as part 
and portion of our very selves, according to party rules and divi- 
sions. Woe to him who does. When a house is on fire, and a mother 
with her child cries for help at the window above, shall the firemen 
at the engine be allowed to trifle away the precious time in party 
bickerings, or is then the only word — " Water ! pump away ; up 
with the ladder !" 

Let us not be like the Byzantines, those wretches who quarreled 
about contemptible party refinements, theological though they were, 
while the truculent Mussulman was steadily drawing nearer — nay, 
some of whom would even go to the lord of the crescent, and with a 
craven heart would beg for a pittance of the spoil, so that they 
would be spared, and could vent their party hatred against their 
kin in blood, and fellows in religion. 

We know of no party in our present troubles ; the word is here 
an empty word. The only line which divides the people of the 
North, runs between the mass of loyal men who stand by their 
country, no matter to what place of political meeting they were 
used to resort, or with what accent they utter the language of the 
land, or what religion they profess, or what sentiments they may 
have uttered in the excitement of former discussions, on the one 
hand, and those on the other hand, who keep outside of that line — 
traitors to their country in the hour of need — or those who allow 
themselves to be misled by shallow names, and by reminiscences 
which cling around those names from by-gone days, finding no appli- 
cation in a time which asks for things more sterling than names, 
theories, or platforms. 

If an alien enemy were to -land his hosts on your shores, would 
you fly to your arms and ring the tocsin because your country is in 



4 NO PARTY NOW, 

danger, or would you meditatively look at your sword and gun, and 
spend your time in pondering whether the administration in power, 
which must and can alone direct the defence of your hearths, has a 
right to be styled by this or that party name, or whether it came 
into power with your assistance, and will appoint some of your party 
to posts of honor or comfortable emoluments ? And will any one 
now lose his time and fair name as an honest and brave citizen, 
when no foreigner, indeed, threatens your country, at least not 
directly, but far more, when a heedless host of law-defying men, 
heaping upon you the vilest vituperation that men who do not leave 
behind them the ingenuity of civilization Avhen they relapse into 
barbarism, can invent — when this host threatens to sunder your 
country and cleave your very history in twain, to deprive you of 
your rivers which God has given you, to extinguish your Nation- 
ality, to break down your liberty, and to make that land, which the 
Distributor of our sphere's geography has placed betjveen the old 
and older world as the greatest link of that civilization which is 
destined to encircle the globe — to make that land the hot-bed of 
angry, petty powers, sinking deeper and deeper as they quarrel and 
fight, and quarreling and fighting more angrily as they sink deeper ? 
It is the very thing your foreign enemies desire, and have long 
desired. When nullification threatened to bring about secession — 
and the term secession was used at that early period — foreign jour- 
nals stated in distinct words that England was deeply interested in 
the contest ; for nullification might bring on secession, and seces- 
sion would cause a general disruption — an occurrence which would 
redound to the essential benefit of Great Britain. 

But the traitors of the North, who have been so aptly called 
adders or copperheads — striking as these reptiles do more secretly 
and deadly even than the rattlesnake, which has some chivalry, at 
least in its tail — believe, or pretend to believe, that no fragmentary 
disruption would follow a division of our country into North and 
South, and advocate a compromise, by which they pretend to believe 
that the two portions may possibly be reunited after a provisional 
division, as our peddlers putty some broken china cup. 

As to the first, that we might pleasantly divide into two comfort- 



ALL FOR OUR COUNTRY. 5 

able portions, we prefer being guided by the experience of all his- 
tory, to following the traitors in their teachings. We will not hear 
of it. We live in an age when the word is Nationalization, not De- 
nationalization ; when fair Italy has risen, like a new-born goddess, 
out of the foaming waves of the Mediterranean. All destruction 
is quick and easy ; all growth and formation slow and toilsome. 
Nations break up, like splendid mirrors dashed to the ground. 
They do not break into a number of well-shaped, neatly framed 
little looking-glasses. But a far more solemn truth even than this 
comes here into play. It is with nations as with families and with 
individuals. Those destined by nature to live in the bonds of friend- 
ship and mutual kindliness, become the bitterest and most irrecon- 
cilable enemies, when once fairly separated in angry enmity; in 
precisely the same degree in which affection and good-will were 
intended to subsist between them. We must have back the South ; or 
else those who will not reunite with us must leave the country ; we 
must have the country at any price. If, however, a plain division 
between the North and the South could take place, who will deny that 
those very traitors would instantly begin to manoeuvre for a gradual 
annexation of the North to the South? It is known to be so. Some 
of them, void of all shame, have avowed it. They are ready to 
petition on their knees for annexation to the South, and to let the 
condescending grantor, " holding awhile his nose," introduce 
slavery, that blessed "corner stone of" the newest " civilization," 
into the North, which has been happily purged from this evil. Let 
us put the heel on this adder, and bruise all treason out of it3 
head. 

As to the compromise which they propose, we know of no com- 
promise with crime that is not criminal itself, and senseless in addi- 
tion to its being wicked. New guarantees, indeed, may be asked 
for at the proper time, but it is now our turn to ask for them. They 
will be guarantees of peace, of the undisturbed integrity of our 
country, of law, and liberty, and security, asked for and insisted 
upon by the Union men, who now pledge themselves not to listen to 
the words compromise, new guarantees for the South, armistice, 
or convention of delegates from the South and North — as long as 
1* 



6 NO PARTY NOW, 

this war shall last, until the North is victorious, and shall have estab- 
lished again the national authority over the length and breadth of 
the country as it was ; over the United States dominion as it was 
before the breaking out of the crime which is now ruining our fair 
land — ruining it in point of wealth, but, with God's help, elevating 
it in character, strength, and dignity. 

We believe that the question of the issue, which must attend the 
present contest, according to the character it has now acquired, is 
reduced to these simple words — Either the North conquers the South, 
or the South conquers the North. Make up your minds for this 
alternative. Either the North conquers the South and re-establishes 
law, freedom, and the integrity of our country, or the South con- 
quers the North by arms, or by treason at home, and covers our 
portion of the country with disgrace and slavery. 

Let us not shrink from facts or mince the truth, but rather plainly 
present to our minds the essential character of the struggle in which 
hundreds of thousands, that ought to be brothers, are now engaged. 
What has brought us to these grave straits ? 

Are we two different races, as the new ethnologists of the South, 
with profound knowledge of history and of their own skins, names, 
and language, proclaim ? Have they produced the names which 
Europe mentions when American literature is spoken of? Have 
they produced our Crawfords ? Have they advanced science ? Have 
they the great schools of the age ? Do they speak the choice idiom 
of the cultivated man ? Have the thinkers and inventors of the age 
their homes in that region ? Is their standard of comfort exalted 
above that of ours ? What has this wondrous race produced ? 
What new idea has it added to the great stock of civilization ? It 
has produced cotton, and added the idea that slavery is divine. 
Does this establish a superior race? 

There is no fact or movement of greater significance in all his- 
tory of the human race, than the settlement of this great continent 
by European people at a period when, in their portion of the globe, 
great nations had been formed, and the National polity had finally 
become the normal type of government ; and it is a fact equally 
pregnant with momentous results, that the Northern portion of this 



ALL FOR OUR COUNTRY. 7 

hemispere came to be colonized chiefly by men who brought along 
with them the seeds of self-government, and a living common law, 
instinct with the principles of manly self-dependence and civil free- 
dom. 

The charters under which they settled, and which divided the 
American territory into colonies, were of little more importance 
than the vessels and their names in which the settlers crossed the 
Atlantic ; nor had the origin of these charters a deep meaning, nor 
was their source always pure. The people in this country always 
felt themselves to be one people, and unitedly they proclaimed and 
achieved their independence. The country as a whole was called 
W by Washington and his compeers America, for want of a more indi- 
vidual name. Still, there was no outward and legal bond between 
the colonies, except the crown of England ; and when our people 
abjured their allegiance to that crown, each colony stood formally 
for itself. The Articles of Confederation were adopted, by which 
our forefathers attempted to establish a confederacy, uniting all 
that felt themselves to be of one nation, but were not one by out- 
ward leo-al form. It was the best united government our fore- 
fathers could think of, or of which, perhaps, the combination of cir- 
cumstances admitted. Each colony came gradually to be called a 
State, and called itself sovereign, although none of them had ever 
exercised any of the highest attributes of sovereignty ; nor did ever 
after the States do so. 

Yfhenever political societies are leagued together, be it by the frail 
bonds of a pure confederacy, or by the consciousness of the people 
that they are intrinsically one people, and form one nation, with- 
out, however, a positive National Government, then the most power- 
ful of these ill-united portions needs must rule; and, as always more 
than one portion wishes to be the leader, intestine struggles ensue 
in a*ll such incoherent governments. It has been so in antiquity ; 
it has been so in the middle ages; it has been so, and is so in 
modern times. Those of our forefathers who later became the 
framers of our Constitution, saw this approaching evil, and they 
observed many other ills which had already overtaken the confede- 
racy. Even Washington, the strong and tenacious patriot, was 



8 NO PARTY NOW, 

brought to the brink of despondency. It was a dark period in our 
history ; and it was then that our fathers most boldly, yet most con- 
siderately, performed the greatest act that our annals record — they 
engrafted a national, complete, and representative government on 
our halting confederacy; a government in which the Senate, though 
still representing the States as States, became Nationalized in a 
great measure, and in which the House of Representatives became 
exclusively National. Virginia, which, under the Articles of Con- 
federation, was approaching the leadership over all (in the actual 
assumption of which she would have been resisted by other rapidly 
growing States, which would inevitably have led to our Peloponne- 
sian war) — Virginia was now represented according to her popula- 
tion, like every other portion of the country; not as Virginia, not 
as a unit, but by a number of representatives who voted, and were 
bound to vote individually, according to their consciences and best 
light, as National men. The danger of internal struggle and pro- 
vincial bitterness had passed, and our country now fairly entered as 
an equal among the leading nations in the course, where nations, 
like Olympic chariot-horses, draw abreast the car of civilization. 
We advanced rapidly; the task assigned to us by Providence was 
performed with a rapidity which had not been known before ; for 
Ave had a National Government commensurate to our land and our 
destiny. 

But while thus united and freed from provincial retardation and 
entanglements, a new portent appeared. 

Slavery, which had been planted here in the colonial times, and 
which had been increased in this country by the parent govern- 
ment against the urgent protestations of the colonists, and especially 
the Virginians, existed in all the colonies at the time when they 
declared themselves independent. It was felt by all to be an evil, 
which must be dealt with as best it might be, and the gradual extinc- 
tion of which must be wisely yet surely provided for. Even Mr. 
Calhoun, in his earlier days, called slavery a scaffolding erected to 
rear the mansion of civilization, which must be taken down when 
the fabric is finished. 

This institution gave way gradually as civilization advanced. It 



\ 



ALL FOR OUR COUNTRY. \) 

has done so in all periods of history, and especially of Christian 
history. Slavery melts away like snow before the rays of rising 
civilization. The South envied the North for getting rid of slavery 
so easily, and often expressed her envy. But a combination of un- 
toward circumstances led the South to change her mind. First, it 
was maintained that if slavery is an evil, it was their affair, and no 
one else had a right to discuss it or interfere with it; then it came 
to be maintained that it was no evil; then slavery came to be de- 
clared an important national element, which required its own dis- 
tinct representation and especial protection ; then it was said — we 
feel ashamed to mention it — that slavery is a divine institution. To 
use the words of the great South Carolinian, whose death we deeply 
mourn — of James Louis Petigru — they placed, like the templars, 
Christ and Mahomet on the same altar. But, though slavery were 
divine, they choked the wells of common knowledge with sand and 
stones, and enacted perpetual ignorance for the slave. Then the 
renewal of that traffic, the record of which fills far the darkest 
pages of European history, and which the most strenuous and pro- 
tracted efforts of civilized nations have not yet wholly succeeded in 
abolishing, was loudly called for ; and our national laws, making 
that unhallowed trade piracy, were declared unconstitutional. Yet 
still another step was to be taken. It was proclaimed that slavery 
is a necessary element of a new and glorious civilization ; and those 
who called themselves conservatives, plunged recklessly into a new- 
fangled theory of politics and civilization. 

Thus slavery came to group again the different portions of our 
country, outside of, and indeed in hostility to, the National Govern- 
ment and the National Constitution. The struggle for the leader- 
ship was upon us. The South declared openly that it must rule ; 
we, in the meantime, declaring that the Nation must rule, and if an 
issue is forced upon us, between the South and the North, then, 
indeed, the North must rule and shall rule. This is the war in 
which we are now engaged — in which, at the moment this is read 
to you, the precious blood of our sons, and brothers, and fathers, is 
flowing. 



10 NO PARTY NOW, 

Whenever men are led, in the downward course of error and 
passion, ultimately to declare themselves, with immoral courage, in 
favor of a thing or principle which for centuries and thousands of 
years their own race has declared, by a united voice, an evil or a 
crime, the mischief does not stop with this single declaration. It 
naturally, and by a well-established law, unhinges the whole 
morality of the man; it warps his intellect, and inflames his soul 
with bewildering passions, with defiance to the simplest truth and 
plainest fact, and with vindictive hatred toward those who cannot 
agree with him. It is a fearful thing to become the defiant idolater 
of wrong. Slavery, and the consequent separation from the rest of 
men, begot pride in the leading men of the South — absurdly even 
pretending to be of a different and better race. Pride begot bitter 
and venomous hatred, and this bitter hatred, coupled with the love 
of owning men as things, begot at last a hatred of that which dis- 
tinguishes the race to which we belong more than aught else — the 
striving for and love of liberty. 

There is no room, then, for pacifying arguments with such men 
in arms against us, against their duty, their country, their civiliza- 
tion. All that remains for the present is the question, who shall be 
the victor ? 

It is for all these reasons which have been stated, that we pledge 
ourselves anew, in unwavering loyalty, to stand by and support the 
Government in all its efforts to suppress the rebellion, and to spare 
no endeavor to maintain, unimpaired, the national unity, both in 
principle and territorial boundary. 

We will support the Government, and call on it with a united 
voice to use greater and greater energy, as the contest may seem to 
draw to a close ; so that whatever advantages we may gain, we may 
pursue them with increasing efficiency, and bring every one in the 
military or civil service, that may be slow in the performance of 
his duty, to a quick and efficient account. 

We approve of the Conscription Act, and will give our loyal aid 
in its being carried out, whenever the Government shall consider the 
increase of our army necessary ; and we believe that the energy of 



ALL FOR OUR COUNTRY. 11 

the Government should be plainly shown by retaliatory measures, 
in checking the savage brutalities committed by the enemy against 
our men in arms, or unarmed citizens, when they fall into their 
hands. 

We declare that slavery, the poisonous root of this war, ought to 
be compressed within its narrowest feasible limits, with a view to its 
speedy extinction. 

We declare that this is no question of politics, but one of patriot- 
ism ; and we hold every one to be a traitor to his country, that 
works or speaks in favor of our criminal enemies, directly or indi- 
rectly, whether his offence be such that the law can overtake him 
or not. 

We declare our inmost abhorence of the secret societies which 
exist among us in favor of the rebellious enemy, and that we will 
denounce every participator in these nefarious societies, whenever 
known to us. We believe publicity the very basis of liberty. 

We pledge our fullest support to the Government in every mea- 
sure which it shall deem fit to adopt against unfriendly and mis- 
chievous neutrality ; and we call upon it, as citizens that have the 
right and duty to call for protection on their own Government, to 
adopt the speediest possible measure to that important end. 

We loyally support our Government in its declarations and mea- 
sures against all and every attempt of mediation, and armed or 
unarmed interference in our civil war. 

We solemnly declare that we will resist every partition of any 
portion of our country to the last extremity, whether this partition 
should be brought about by rebellious or treasonable citizens of our 
own, or by foreign powers, in the way that Poland was torn to 
pieces. 

We pronounce every foreign minister accredited to our Govern- 
ment, who tampers with our enemies, and holds covert intercourse 
with disloyal men among us, as failing in his duty toward us and 
toward his own people, and we await with attention the action of 
our Government regarding the recent and surprising breach of this 
duty. 



12 



NO PARTY NOW. 



And we call upon every American, be he such by birth or choice, 
to join the loyal movement of these National Leagues, which is 
naught else than to join and follow our beckoning flag, and to adopt 
for his device — 

OUR COUNTRY. 



